By THE NEW YORK TIMES

August 11, 2014

1 DAVID AND GOLIATH by Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown. How disadvantages can work in our favor, from the author of “The Tipping Point” and “Outliers.” (2)

2 QUIET by Susan Cain. Crown. Introverts — one-third of the population — are undervalued in American society. (1)

3 THE POWER OF HABIT by Charles Duhigg. Random House. A Times reporter’s account of the science behind forming habits, and breaking them. (5)

4 THINKING, FAST AND SLOW by Daniel Kahneman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The winner of a Nobel in economic science discusses how we make choices in business and personal life and when we can and cannot trust our intuitions. (3)

5 THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot. Crown. The story of an African-American woman whose cancerous cells were extensively cultured without her permission in 1951. (6)

6 HOW NOT TO BE WRONG by Jordan Ellenberg. Penguin Press. A mathematician shows how his discipline helps us think about problems of politics, medicine and commerce. (4)

7 NEIL ARMSTRONG: A LIFE OF FLIGHT by Jay Barbree. Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s. A biography of the American astronaut who first walked on the moon.

8 HOW DOGS LOVE US by Gregory Berns. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. A neuroscientist uses an M.R.I. scanner to probe the psyche of the brain of his adopted dog.

9 WAR OF THE WHALES by Joshua Horwitz. Simon & Schuster. How the Navy’s use of sonar deep in the ocean was discovered to be a threat to whales.

10 INSIDE OF A DOG by Alexandra Horowitz. Scribner. The canine brain. What the world is like from a dog’s point of view.

11 THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY by Denise Kiernan. Simon & Schuster. Thousands of women took well-paid jobs in Oak Ridge, Tenn., during World War II, not knowing that the government project where they worked was enriching uranium for the first atomic bomb. (8)

17 THE FANTASTIC LABORATORY OF DR. WEIGL by Arthur Allen. W. W. Norton. How a doctor who created the first vaccine against typhus used it to sabotage the Nazis.

18 THE EXAMINED LIFE by Stephen Grosz. W. W. Norton. A psychoanalytical look at how the stories told by patients lend insights to the hidden feelings behind our most baffling behavior.

19 SALLY RIDE by Lynn Sherr. Simon & Schuster. A portrait of the astronaut who was the first American woman in space, by an ABC News reporter who covered NASA. (20)

20 STUFF MATTERS by Mark Miodownik. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. From concrete to porcelain: an exploration of the myriad materials that shape the human-made world. (7)

The titles ranked here are selected by the science editors from all adult nonfiction books reported to The New York Times for the month. These titles are fundamentally based on the sciences; those for which science is more tangential or peripheral are generally excluded. Rankings reflect combined print and e-book sales for July 2014. An asterisk (*) indicates that a book’s sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above. A dagger (†) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders. More information on rankings and methodology: nytimes.com/science.